Suspend Disbelief Quotes

Like her idol Steve Jobs, she emitted a reality distortion field that forced people to momentarily suspend disbelief.

I'm at my strongest when I'm able to let go, when I suspend my beliefs as well as disbeliefs, and leave myself open to all possibilities. That also seems to be when I'm able to experience the most internal clarity and synchronicities.

A Piece of writing has to seduce the reader, it has to suspend disbelief and earn the reader's trust

Imagination, at the very least, brings us joy; at the very most, it empowers us to suspend disbelief and chase the impossible.

There are, after all, atheists who say they wish the fable were true but are unable to suspend the requisite disbelief, or who have relinquished belief only with regret. To this I reply: who wishes that there was a permanent, unalterable celestial despotism that subjected us to continual surveillance and could convict us of thought-crime, and who regarded us as its private property even after we died? How happy we ought to be, at the reflection that there exists not a shred of respectable evidence to support such a horrible hypothesis.

In order to believe clients' accounts of trauma, you need to suspend any pre-conceived notions that you have about what is possible and impossible in human experience. As simple as they may sound, it may be difficult to do so.

And, pray tell Curly, just how is my ass supposed to fit on this seat?" "The same way it manages to fit into this room-suspend your disbelief, Louis Tomlinson.

If we are to use the words ‘childish’ and ‘infantile’ as terms of disapproval, we must make sure that they refer only to those characteristics of childhood which we become better and happier by outgrowing. Who in his sense would not keep, if he could, that tireless curiosity, that intensity of imagination, that facility of suspending disbelief, that unspoiled appetite, that readiness to wonder, to pity, and to admire?

Doubt is a first cousin to faith, Ghosh. To have faith, you have to suspend your disbelief.

As they say in the theater, suspend your disbelief. Otherwise, the reality of this world is very much like yours and mine.

They probably didn't care if it was the real thing or not. They wanted it to be. And by suspending their disbelief they could believe in the illusion.

try to explain to her she’s dead and therefore has no further need for Romeo’s impressive erection, but she’s finding it difficult to suspend her disbelief.

Of course I know that the twins are only words on a page, and I'm certainly not the sort of writer who talks to his characters or harbours any illusions about the creative process. But at the same time, I think it's juvenile and arrogant when literary writers compulsively remind their readers that the characters aren't real. People know that already. The challenge is to make an intelligent reader suspend disbelief, to seduce them into the reality of a narrative.

People might be skeptical about their ability to change if they’re by themselves, but a group will convince them to suspend disbelief. A community creates belief.

The sun was up, the room already too warm. Light filtered in through the net curtains, hanging suspended in the air, sediment in a pond. My head felt like a sack of pulp. Still in my nightgown, damp from some fright I'd pushed aside like foliage, I pulled myself up and out of my tangled bed, then forced myself through the usual dawn rituals - the ceremonies we perform to make ourselves look sane and acceptable to other people. The hair must be smoothed down after whatever apparitions have made it stand on end during the night, the expression of staring disbelief washed from the eyes. The teeth brushed, such as they are. God knows what bones I'd been gnawing in my sleep.

But you have to suspend disbelief if you ever want to enjoy another movie or watch the president for more than fifteen seconds without running into the street demanding a new constitutional convention.

I’m at my strongest when I’m able to let go, when I suspend my beliefs as well as disbeliefs, and leave myself open to all possibilities. That also seems to be when I’m able to experience the most internal clarity and synchronicities. My sense is that the very act of needing certainty is a hindrance to experiencing greater levels of awareness. In contrast, the process of letting go and releasing all attachment to any belief or outcome is cathartic and healing. The dichotomy is that for true healing to occur, I must let go of the need to be healed and just enjoy and trust in the ride that is life.

We may exhort ourselves to read tolerantly, we may quote Coleridge on the willing suspension of disbelief until we think ourselves totally suspended in a relativistic universe, and still we will find many books which postulate readers we refuse to become, books that depend on 'beliefs' or 'attitudes'...which we cannot adopt even hypothetically as our own.

We must believe, or as Samuel Taylor Coleridge suggested, we must willingly suspend our disbelief.

Supernatural is a word for anything that doesn’t fit your present understanding of the world. I need you to suspend your disbelief. I need you to simply accept that these things are possible.

Life is pretty much a series of good and bad moments right up until the moment you die,’ he said stiffly. ‘Which is arguably a bad one. Love doesn’t change that. I have a hard time suspending my disbelief. Besides, can you think of a single real-life romance that actually ended like Bridget fucking Jones?

The odds that Holmes could pull off this latest Houdini act while under criminal investigation were very long, but watching her confidently walk the audience through her sleek slide show helped crystallize for me how she’d gotten this far: she was an amazing saleswoman. She never once stumbled or lost her train of thought. She wielded both engineering and laboratory lingo effortlessly and she showed seemingly heartfelt emotion when she spoke of sparing babies in the NICU from blood transfusions. Like her idol Steve Jobs, she emitted a reality distortion field that forced people to momentarily suspend disbelief.

I say to my congregants, "If you believe in God, the best thing you can do for yourself is to suspend your belief for a while, because undoubtedly your God is too small and you must grow beyond that God. On the other hand, if you don't believe in God, your very disbelief is a stumbling block. Kick it away and place your faith in somehting more ennobling than disbelief. Take a flier. Expand your purview. Take a leap of faith.

While I’m reading a story I want to be able to suspend disbelief; the more questions of authorial reliability force themselves on me, the weaker the hold of the narrative. This is a naïve approach to fiction, granted, but a tough one, since intellect, cleverness, charm, wit, tact, even fact cannot conceal incredibility.

I have always thought a person needs to constantly refine the capacity to suspend disbelief in order to keep emotions organized and not suffer debilitating confusion, and I mean just toward the things of daily life. I suppose this admits to a desperate sort of pragmatism. Still, it works for me. What human heart isn’t in extremis?

One thing that distinguishes a boss from a leader is the ability to suspend belief and disbelief so that innovations and new processes will have a chance to emerge.

suspended her disbelief and tried to make herself open to the idea that

Children are capable, of course, of literary belief, when the story-maker's art is good enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called 'willing suspension of disbelief'. But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful 'sub-creator'. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is 'true': it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed.

So, in the still-lingering shadow of 1861–65, let us suspend disbelief for a while and look more attentively at Europe’s Great War. To a large extent, American perceptions of 1914–18 have been influenced by debates in Britain—readily accessible via the “common language.” There 1914–18 has become a literary war, a human tragedy detached from its moorings in historical events, entrenched in the mud of Flanders and Picardy, illuminated only by a few antiwar poets such as Wilfred Owen—perhaps the most studied writer in the English school curriculum after William Shakespeare. “My subject is War and the pity of War,” Owen declared. “The Poetry is in the pity.” Yet by reducing the conflict to personal tragedies, however moving, the British have lost the big picture: history has been distilled into poetry.6

We have seen, therefore, that I am not allowed even to *assume*, for the sake of the necessary practical use of my reason *God, freedom, immortality*, unless at the same time *I deprive* speculative reason of its pretensions to transcendent insights. Reason, namely, in order to arrive at these, must employ principles which extend only to objects of possible experience, and which, if in spite of this they are applied also to what cannot be an object of experience, actually always change this into an appearance, thus rendering all practical *expansion* of pure reason impossible. Hence I had to suspend *knowledge* in order to make room for *belief*. For the dogmatism of metaphysics without a preceding critique of pure reason, is the source of all that disbelief which opposes morality and which is always very dogmatic.

Opportunity to suspend disbelief is often why we watch movies. The stories and images touch us and shift perspectives in ways we may not allow in our daily lives. As readily as you check your “this isn’t real” attitude at the ticket counter – when transformers are defending earth against aliens and 21st century vampires frolic by daylight – on the big screen of your heart and mind train for, run and celebrate finishing your first marathon.

we need a more capacious model of love. In this model, love is not predicated on sharing each other’s world as we might share a soul. It is predicated, instead, on sharing it as we might share a story. This analogy is not accidental. What is true of a story is true of love: for either one to work, you’d better be good at talking and good at listening. Likewise, if stories only succeed when we consent to suspend disbelief, relationships require of us something similar: the ability to let go of our own worldview long enough to be intrigued and moved by someone else’s. This is storybook love in a whole different sense of the phrase. It is not about living idyllically in our similarities, but about living peacefully and pleasurably in our differences. It is not bestowed from beyond the normal human realm but struggled for and gained, slowly and with effort. And it is not about unchanging love. It is about letting love change us.

The Skinny Woman Who Is Beautiful and Toned but Also Gluttonous and Disgusting Again, I am more than willing to suspend my disbelief for good set decoration alone. One pristine kitchen from a Nancy Meyers movie like “It’s Complicated” compensates for five scenes of Diane Keaton being caught half naked in a topiary. But I can’t suspend disbelief enough, for instance, if the gorgeous and skinny heroine is also a ravenous pig when it comes to food. And everyone in the movie—her parents, her friends, her boss—are all complicit in this huge lie. They constantly tell her to stop eating. And this actress, this poor skinny actress who obviously lost weight to play the likable lead character, has to say things like “Shut up, you guys! I love cheesecake! If I want to eat an entire cheesecake, I will!” If you look closely, you can see this woman’s ribs through the dress she’s wearing—that’s how skinny she is, this cheesecake-loving cow.

Unwilling to accept the uncertainties and high political costs of a military confrontation with the Taliban, American diplomats also suspended disbelief and lazily embraced Saudi and Pakistani arguments that the Taliban would mature and moderate.

What happens to those readers who are totally incapable of distinguishing between fiction and reality? Their response produces no aesthetic effects, because they are so busy taking the story seriously they don’t ask whether it’s told well or badly, they make no attempt to learn from it, and they fail to identify with the characters. They simply exhibit what I would call a fictional deficit; they are unable to suspend disbelief. Since there are more such readers than we might imagine, this bears thinking about, because we know that all other aesthetic and moral questions elude them.

Supernatural is a word for anything that doesn’t fit your present understanding of the world. I need you to suspend your disbelief. I need you to simply accept that these things are possible.” “I’m supposed to take it as true that you’re a god?” “Don’t be silly. I am not a god,” he said. “I am a mortal who has woken up, and there is power in awareness.

Good fiction doesn’t claim to mirror reality at all. It indicts reality by providing a paradigm of shape and order and justice—the way we all know things should be—without suggesting that’s how things really are. Good fiction is the mirage that declares itself a mirage, yet compels us to faith through its beauty. Good fiction is the dream that’s too good to be true, so perfect and symmetrical that it gives itself away every time. But it doesn’t trick you into suspending your disbelief by trying to look anything like reality. Good fiction makes you acutely, painfully aware of your disbelief, and makes you believe anyway. And when it’s done well—when it’s done right—good fiction is more real than reality.

When someone Saw into that world, of course it would be startling, even frightening, because what she saw then was a mirror reflecting back the mysterious reaches within her own hidden self. The more imaginative a person was, the more able to suspend her disbelief, the truer the image would seem. The more real. Especially since such moments must spring up out of one's subconscious; ...

Studying the mining industry requires a healthy dose of skepticism and perhaps even a measure of cynicism, especially in relation to the promotion of the virtuous discourses of sustainability and corporate social responsibility. In contrast to the anthropological tradition of suspending one’s disbelief when conducting ethnographic research, I have declined to give the mining industry the benefit of the doubt: its track record demands a higher standard of proof.

Each being in the universe, therefore, inhabits a private world. It is as if the universe were populated by countless cinemas, each occupied by a single person, each eternally viewing a different film projected by consciousness, each eternally suspending disbelief. For the Yogacara, ignorance and suffering result from believing the movie to be real, from mistaking the projections to be an external world, from thinking that what appear to be external objects are independent of consciousness, and then running after them, desiring some and hating others. For the Yogacara, wisdom is the insight that everything is of the nature of consciousness and the product of one's own projections. With this insight, desire and hatred, attachment and aversion, naturally cease, for their objects are seen to be illusions. With the achievement of enlightenment, the substratum consciousness is transformed into the mirror like wisdom of a buddha.

Almost worse than the sorrow of missing her was the fact that Mom's death had revealed everything to be meaningless. So much of what I'd thought was true had turned out to be an illusion. I saw people around me living by these illusions— that love and safety could be counted on, that life had meaning and the future could be controlled— and I did not feel that I could ever again share their suspended disbelief. I was swimming against a strong, cold current: I could see them there, playing on a sunny beach, but I couldn't rejoin them. Continuing the struggle seemed not only incredibly painful but, even worse, pointless.

There are some things that people will pay for even an imaginary chance at having. Youth, love, sex, wealth, and status are so deeply and painfully desired that people are willing to suspend their disbelief for the privilege of imagining that they might be obtainable. The need for social belonging trumps all other needs, and even trumps our own rationality. Being old, fat, poor, or impotent means being in social pain. Just as the desperate, terminally ill cancer patient often turns to expensive placebos for an imaginary chance at more life, desperate, terminally alive sad people turn to expensive placebos for a chance to imagine a decent life.

Even as we start to register the tremors of imaginal perception, we may face a concurrent barrage of disdain, disbelief, and even outright hostility from our usual reasoned rootedness in the five senses. As the subtle senses develop, and we start to actually see energy fields or feel the edges blur between our body and the person next to us, we may conclude we are exhausted, have eaten bad food, are becoming ill, or must be falling in love. We call these subtle openings "chemistry," a funny feeling, the flu, or a waking dream. On the other hand, if we can suspend our disbelief in invisibles long enough, we may find ourselves roaming in imaginal fields for longer and longer periods of time.

In the film Death and the Maiden, there is a point during which Sigourney Weaver has duct-taped Ben Kingsley to a chair in her living room. The characters are re-enacting a reverse torture scene. To move the plot of a woman tortured toward its desire: to torture the torturer. To extract a confession. The chair is a prop. A prop is a stage object that supports the drama. If the audience suspends their disbelief the chair transforms itself in time and space. If the audience is left unconvinced the chair is silly and imaginable in anyone’s living room. In the film Romeo is Bleeding Lena Olin sits in a chair and spreads her legs so that her cunt can be seen/scene. Her nationality keeps slipping; she is what we want her to be in a million ways. Her severed arm our severed arms. Her mouth opening like a country. In the film Exotica Atom Egoyan has the male lead (primary actor, financial draw) sit in a chair immobile while a child-stripper dances excruciatingly close to his body. His hands on his thighs. His mouth open. His mind seated. Torture. In the film Barbarella Jane Fonda is trapped inside of a science fiction sexual orgasm chair. This is before her politics come. In the film Breaker Morant two men mutated soldiers lost are executed—shot through the chest—while seated in chairs. In my kitchen I jack my father off while he sits in a chair, my hand smally domestic, the back of the chair holding his back, the legs of the chair forgiving his weight, the wood of the chair blonde, the hair of the girl blonde, the room magnified to cinematic proportions.

Being is that which disturbs our insistence on remaining in the life-numbing realm of our secret desperation. It is the itch that cannot be scratched, the whisper that will not be denied. To be, to truly be, is not a given. Most of us live in a state where our being has long ago been exiled to the shadow realm of our silent anguish. At times being will break through the fabric of our unconsciousness to remind us that we are not living the life we could be living, the life that truly matters. At other times being will recede into the background silently waiting for our devoted attention. But make no mistake: being—your being—is the central issue of life. To remain unconscious of being is to be trapped within an ego-driven wasteland of conflict, strife, and fear that only seems customary because we have been brainwashed into a state of suspended disbelief where a shocking amount of hate, dishonesty, ignorance, and greed are viewed as normal and sane. But they are not sane, not even close to being sane. In fact, nothing could be less sane and unreal than what we human beings call reality.

I've asked a number of analytic metaphysicians whether they can distinguish their enterprise from naïve naïve naive auto-anthropology of their clan, and have not received any compelling answers. The alternative is sophisticated naïve anthropology (both auto- and hetero-)-- the anthropology that reserves judgment about whether any of the theorems produced by the exercise deserve to be trusted--and this is a feasible and frequently valuable project. I propose that this is the enterprise to which analytic metaphysicians should turn, since it requires rather minimal adjustments to their methods and only one major revision of their raison d'être : they must rollback their pretensions and acknowledge that their research is best seen as a preparatory reconnaissance of the terrain of the manifest image, suspending both belief and disbelief the way anthropologists do when studying an exotic culture: let's pretend for the nonce that the natives are right, and see what falls out. Since at least a large part of philosophy’s task, in my vision of the discipline, consists in negotiating the traffic back and forth between the manifest and scientific images, it is a good idea for philosophers to analyze what they are up against in the way of focus options before launching into their theory-building and theory-criticizing. One of the hallmarks of sophisticated naïve anthropology is its openness to counterintuitive discoveries. As long as you're doing naïve anthropology, counterintuitiveness (to the natives) counts against your reconstruction; when you shift gears and begin asking which aspects of the naïve “theory” are true, counterintuitiveness loses its force as an objection and even becomes, on occasion, a sign of significant progress. In science in general, counterintuitive results are prized, after all.

Starting in the 1900s, from coast to coast and seven days a week, Americans more than anyone on Earth could immerse in the virtuosic fantasies created and sold by show business and the media. This was a new condition. As we spent more and more fabulous hours engaged in the knowing and willing suspension of disbelief, experiencing the unreal as real, we became more habituated to suspending disbelief unconsciously and involuntarily as well.

In fact, Mott had not been forced to believe anything: the willing lies of fiction depend upon willing believers. Like love, belief is an act of volition.

I want to suspend my disbelief. I want to see magic happen. I want to believe that there's a world just beneath the surface of our world where anything can happen, where magic is possible and dreams come true.

After liberation, many of the inmates were embarrassed to remember their one-time faith in dreams; the extreme stress of camp life had allowed them to suspend their disbelief. “It is hard to tell why we were all so naïve,” one survivor wrote. “Nowadays, we see them [the dream interpretations] as immature or even silly, but back then they were simply necessary,” said another.

Magic isn’t about make-believe, after all. It’s just about suspending your own disbelief sufficiently to see the wonder that exists inside each and every moment of reality.

Give It Positive Energy As you focus on your goal, think about it in a positive, encouraging way. Make strong positive statements to yourself: that it exists; that it has come or is now coming to you. See yourself receiving or achieving it. These positive statements are called “affirmations.”* While you use affirmations, try to temporarily suspend any doubts or disbelief you may have, at least for the moment, and practice getting the feeling that what you desire is very real and possible.

Manuals delineate the storytelling mechanics, which are important, but storytellers are more magicians than mechanics. Theirs is the art of controlled revelation of nothing less than the meaning of life, not all of it but some of it. These magi cast the spells that seduce the audience into suspending its disbelief in fictional characters and plots. They are aided by the audience’s eagerness to suspend disbelief.

I say some things in here about an invention that allows our heroine to breathe underwater for a bit, and avoid the bends. Do not try this at home. It’s entirely made up, and honestly, probably impossible. Please suspend your disbelief for this monster fucker book.

I enjoy watching people fall in love on-screen so much that I can suspend my disbelief for the contrived situations that only happen in the heightened world of romantic comedies. I have come to enjoy the moment when the normal lead guy, say, slips and falls right on top of the hideously expensive wedding cake. I actually feel robbed when the female lead’s dress doesn’t get torn open at a baseball game while the JumboTron is on her.

Furthermore—and more importantly for the argument I develop here—in the case of this type of hybridity, we, as the readers, are expected to suspend our disbelief and imagine that these are the actual words spoken or thought by the character or the embodied narrator. Therefore, I

I suspended my disbelief, and left it floating in mid air.

You aren’t allowed back until you’ve learned to willingly suspend disbelief.

Since comedy encourages the audience to suspend disbelief, humorists can take advantage of every opportunity to stretch the truth. In other circumstances, unmitigated exaggeration would be viewed as lying. In humor, clever exaggeration is rewarded with laughter.

Storylines from fiction always seem inherently improbable to occur in real life, yet when we read them we are happy to suspend our disbelief, which may simply suggest that in our everyday lives we have an irrational craving for certainty and probability.

their interpretation of the data, to the tendency to "suspend our disbelief" in order to have a more immersive play experience. Kurt Squire found similar patterns when he sought to integrate the commercial game Civilization III into

Now, it may be objected that Orwell was no Borges, that Nineteen Eighty-Four is no postmodern literary experiment, and that I am considering the Appendix too curiously. Perhaps the Newspeak essay should be seen simply as a parody 'presented in the form of a mock-survey, scientific and historical, of the language of Oceania,' whose purpose is to illustrate 'how a totalitarian oligarchy uses the rational tools of science as the instrument of power.' Or perhaps the problem I have identified could be explained as one more manifestation of 'the generic contradiction between naturalism and satire that is the basic formal determinant of the book.' Furthermore, it is pointless to second-guess an author; there are commonsense explanations for Orwell's decision to place the Newspeak essay in an Appendix, and for his failure to identify precisely the essay's author; the incongruities between the Appendix and the novel proper do not reduce the political urgency of the total work; it is a mistake to come to Nineteen Eighty-Four with expectations derived from more conventional novels; paradoxes are the stuff of futuristic stories; readers have a duty to suspend their disbelief; even Homer nods. But, if it was unlike Orwell to lure us deliberately into a hall of mirrors, he certainly did not lack ingenuity. And, even if he encountered difficulties he was unable to solve, his imperfect solutions were consonant with the plan to convey a world deprived of 'objective truth.' Even though his handling of the Appendix may have had unforeseen consequences for the book as a whole, the confusion raised by the document nevertheless 'works.' The footnote's implied promise of verification is hollow, and the reader's attempts to determine the 'objective truth' about Oceania—its social and political structure, its language, its fate—are frustrated. By trying to reconcile the novel and the Appendix, we experience for ourselves—'outside' the novel, as it were—what it might be like to inhabit a world in which the authenticity (never mind the accuracy or objectivity) of all documents is in doubt, in which documents are almost dreamlike, unfixed in time, infused with self-contradiction, at once recognisable and cryptic. Those who keep a checklist of Orwell's 'prophecies' may credit him with anticipating and dramatising the age of 'disinformation.

If we are encouraged to read high fantasies like The Tempest and urged to “enjoy a magic island and ‘believe’ in an Ariel and a Caliban,” then why should we not also “suspend our disbelief” and enjoy the invented world of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings? Why not enter in and believe also in the magic of barrow-wights and orc-blades, Hobbiton, Tom Bombadil, and the tree-top city of Lothlórien?

As Chris Milk, an early VR pioneer, explains: You read a book; your brain reads letters printed in ink on paper and transforms that into a world. You watch a movie; you’re seeing imagery inside of a rectangle while you’re sitting inside a room, and your brain translates that into a world. And you connect to this even though you know it’s not real, but because you’re in the habit of suspending disbelief. With virtual reality, you’re essentially hacking the visual-audio system of your brain and feeding it a set of stimuli that’s close enough to the stimuli it expects that it sees it as truth. Instead of suspending your disbelief, you actually have to remind yourself not to believe.

This is a comment on the “science” in this science fiction novel. I’ve always been partial to science fiction that posed a “what if” question. Not everything in the story has to be scientifically possible, but you suspend your disbelief regarding one or two things that aren’t thought to be possible. Essentially you ask, what if something (such as faster than light travel) were possible, how might that change our world? Each of the Ell Donsaii stories asks at least one such question.

All my life, I have binge-watched crime dramas and love movies with cops being the heroes, but this wasn’t a movie. This was real life and it was happening in real time. At the conclusion of the two-hour meeting, I wanted to tell the taxi driver not to take us back to the DNC but right to the Pentagon. This was a war, clearly, but waged on a different kind of battlefield. During that twelve-block ride up Capitol Hill, we didn’t say a thing. Henry looked left, Ray looked right, Tom was checking his phone, and I was in suspended disbelief looking straight up at the dome of the U.S. Capitol. As soon as we got back into the building, we sat numb and silent on the couches in Debbie’s office. I am not one to tremble, because I am my daddy’s girl and I do not scare easily.

Loretta closed her eyes and braced herself. Whatever it was the other Indian was saying, he was clearly arguing in her behalf. There hovered in the air a charged expectancy, turbulent, tingling along her nerve endings to the core of her, so that, for a suspended moment, she felt a peculiar sense of oneness with the man above her, perceiving his tumultuous emotions, his indecision, as if she were an integral part of him. He wanted to spill her blood with a primal ferocity, but something, perhaps the Almighty Himself, stayed his hand. Sensing reprieve, grasping for it with eager disbelief, she lifted her lashes in confusion to see the same emotion reflected in his cobalt eyes. He began to tremble, as if the lance weighed a thousand pounds. And suddenly she knew that as much as he longed to murder her, a part of him couldn’t, wouldn’t throw the lance. It made no sense. She could see nothing but hatred written on his chiseled face. He had surely killed hundreds of times and would kill again. Slowly he lowered his arm and stared at her as if she had bested him in some way. Then, so quickly she couldn’t be sure she saw it, pain flashed across his face. “So you’re sweet?” His smile dripped ice. “We shall see, woman, we shall see.

Same premise holds for the liberal critique of “American hegemony” (a term from the 1990s and early 2000s that is very rarely used anymore, but the premise still holds); from the position that America will hold a permanent hegemonic position. This cynical disbelief in the *end* of the Empire’s hegemony is what sustains the decadence that accelerates its precipitous decline. Same thing with global warming or any other exigencies. The denial of the “end” is what accelerates the end. The admission of the crisis is what accelerates the action necessary to negate the crisis and, therefore, turn the cynic into someone who can justify non-belief in the crisis because in the evaporation of the emergency, the proof that the emergency existed is removed, and, therefore, the cynic becomes even more assured that their cynicism is justified. If you do not believe in global warming and policies change to the point where carbon emissions are reduced and global warming is averted, the first thing a cynic will say is, “See! I told you global warming was nothing to worry about!” Same thing with the COVID quarantine and vaccine measures. If they did not work to evade the virus the cynic would cry that the measures were not effective and therefore nobody should trust the government. If the measure did work and the virus was evaded, the cynic would cling to the cynicism and say, “See! The crisis of the virus would have been averted! What is all the fuss? Why did everyone worry?” An ideology succeeds when the facts that at first appearance should serve to contradict it start to serve as arguments in its favor. There is a sense that “enjoyment itself, which we experience as ‘transgression’, is in its innermost status something imposed, ordered—when we enjoy… this obscene call ‘Enjoy!’, is the superego.” Cultural downfall is pressed into action—by the decadent attitudes of those who suspend disbelief even as the demise of hegemonic power is unfolding before their eyes. The same holds true for those who disbelieve that the Other can actually overtake them, and the downplaying of cunning tendencies in the Neighbors. There is an infantilizing process that misunderestimated the possibility that the Other can mobilize itself into a force that can become a “master”-signifier where you are the “subject” to the Other, the condescension that “their” power will remain virtual and never become fully realized as an actual force enacting violence upon you, this is the condescension of liberal compassion towards the “Neighbors.

Listening is suspending disbelief. We are openly receiving. Paying attention with no preconceived ideas. The only goal is to fully and clearly understand what is being transmitted, remaining totally present with what’s being expressed—and allowing it to be what it is. Anything less is not only a disservice to the speaker, but also to yourself. While creating and defending a story in your own head, you miss information that might alter or evolve your current thoughts.

It truly wasn’t fear. It was merely that he knew the moment was coming when all disbelief must be suspended. The moment when he would confront the impossible.

Eroticism, intertwined as it is with imagination, is another form of play. I think of play as an alternative reality midway between the actual and the fictitious, a safe space where we experiment, reinvent ourselves, and take chances. Through play we suspend disbelief—we pretend something is real even when we damn well know it is not. Earnestness has no place here.

People might be skeptical about their ability to change if they’re by themselves, but a group will convince them to suspend disbelief. A community creates

was temporarily suspending my disbelief, to allow an unusual experience to happen.

Is that what claims of seeing Jesus are about? Are we supposed to play along and pretend we believe what Christians across the centuries have claimed? Sometimes it feels like that. When churchgoers claim that God has spoken to them, using such language as “God spoke to my heart,” we never respond by saying, “Hogwash.” We’re respectful. Empathic. We suspend our disbelief, much as we do when we read fantasy novels and fairy tales. So maybe I’m the problem. By not believing in ghosts—by lacking imagination—perhaps I disqualify myself from seeing them.

To be sure, no novel will deceive the best type of reader...He can enter, while he reads, into each author's point of view without either accepting or rejecting it, suspending when necessary his disbelief and (what is harder) his belief.

I once saw a so-called "children's pantomime," the straight story of Puss-in-Boots, with even the metamorphosis of the ogre into a mouse. Had this been mechanically successful it would have either terrified the spectators or else have been just a turn of high-class conjuring. As it was, though done with some ingenuity of lighting, disbelief had not so much to be suspended as hanged, drawn, and quartered.

MARRIAGE IS A FUNNY THING. THERE ARE SO MANY people in the world, and you decide to commit the rest of your life, the rest of your emotional energy, to just one. You assume that the mysterious connection that ties you to one another will hold. A connection that can’t be trusted, one that probably manifests in that same mystical space where stories come from. A place that allows you to suspend your disbelief. Marriage assumes that

Suspend your disbelief.

Magic and miracles are the exclusive privilege of those who consistently believe. There is no such thing as ‘temporarily suspending your disbelief’ in order to access such metaphysical wonders. You either believe...or you don’t.

Non-voters are the single biggest factor in American political life, and their swelling numbers are, just like the Trump phenomenon, a profound indictment of our system. But they don’t exist on TV, because they suspend our disbelief in the Hitler vs. Hitler show.

When, in Being and Time,Heidegger insists that death is the onlyevent which cannot be taken over by another subject for me—an-other cannot die for me, in my place—the obvious counterexampleis Christ himself: did he not, in the extreme gesture of interpassiv-ity, take over for us the ultimate passive experience of dying? Christdies so that we are given a chance to live forever....The problemhere is not only that, obviously, we don’tlive forever (the answer tothis is that it is the Holy Spirit, the community of believers, whichlives forever), but the subjective status of Christ: when he was dyingon the Cross, did he know about his Resurrection-to-come? If he didthen it was all a game, the supreme divine comedy, since Christ knewhis suffering was just a spectacle with a guaranteed good outcome—in short, Christ was faking despair in his “Father, why hast thou for-saken me?” If he didn’t, then in what precise sense was Christ (also)divine? Did God the Father limit the scope of knowledge of Christ’smind to that of a common human consciousness, so that Christ ac-tually thought he was dying abandoned by his father? Was Christ, ineffect, occupying the position of the son in the wonderful joke aboutthe rabbi who turns in despair to God, asking Him what he shoulddo with his bad son, who has deeply disappointed him; God calmlyanswers: “Do the same as I did: write a new testament!”What is crucial here is the radical ambiguity of the term “the faithof Jesus Christ,” which can be read as subjective or objectivegenitive: it can be either “the faith ofChrist” or “the faith / of us, be-lievers / inChrist.” Either we are redeemed because of Christ’s purefaith, or we are redeemed by our faith in Christ, if and insofar as webelieve in him. Perhaps there is a way to read the two meanings to-gether: what we are called to believe in is not Christ’s divinity as suchbut, rather, his faith, his sinless purity. What Christianity proposes isthe figure of Christ as our subject supposed to believe:in our ordinary lives,we never truly believe, but we can at least have the consolation thatthere is One who truly believes (the function of what Lacan, in hisseminar Encore,called y’a de l’un).The final twist here, however, is thaton the Cross, Christ himself has to suspend his belief momentarily.So maybe, at a deeper level, Christ is, rather, our (believers’) subject supposed NOTto believe: it is not our belief we transpose onto others, but,rather, our disbelief itself. Instead of doubting, mocking, and ques-tioning things while believing through the Other, we can also trans-pose onto the Other the nagging doubt, thus regaining the abilityto believe. (And is there not, in exactly the same way, also the func-tion of the subject supposed not to know? Ta ke little children who are sup-posed not to know the “facts of life,” and whose blessed ignorancewe, knowing adults, are supposed to protect by shielding them frombrutal reality; or the wife who is supposed not to know about herhusband’s secret affair, and willingly plays this role even if she re-ally knows all about it, like the young wife in The Age of Innocence;or, inacademia, the role we assume when we ask someone: “OK, I’ll pre-tend I don’t know anything about this topic—try to explain it to mefrom scratch!”) And, perhaps, the true communion with Christ, thetrue imitatio Christi,is to participate in Christ’s doubt and disbelief.There are two main interpretations of how Christ’s death dealswith sin: sacrificial and participatory.4In the first one, we humansare guilty of sin, the consequence of which is death; however, Godpresented Christ, the sinless one, as a sacrifice to die in our place—through the shedding of his blood, we may be forgiven and freedfrom condemnation. In the second one, human beings lived “inAdam,” in the sphere of sinful humanity, under the reign of sin anddeath. Christ became a human being, sharing the fate of those “inAdam” to the end (dying on the Cross), but...

Whether ghosts exist, it was silly to go to an expensive, infamously haunted inn if you didn't at least want to pretend. There was no need to be the sort of person who goes to a horror movie and points out it is all fake. We know. It's a movie. We suspended our disbelief when the lights dimmed. You are not made erudite by waving at the projectionist.

Dear Readers: Please forgive this intrusion, but we (whom you will get to know shortly) feel a need to express to those who have been so kind to come along on Fletcher’s journey thus far: Sorry. It is now evident that what is about to happen to our hero is beyond usual earthly conventions, if one subscribes to the idea that earthly conventions are, in fact, usual. We suspect you do not; advanced and literate earthlings like you (yes, flattery is a tool plied in any dimension) are willing to suspend disbelief when faced with the irrefutable wonder and mystery that exist in such depth, scope, and volume on your planet. Still, you might have preferred the trajectory of Fletcher’s story to follow a less wild arc, perhaps something transformational, but more along the lines of a career change, or an act of heroism, or the meeting of a soul mate. At this point, we’re certain Fletcher would also opt for these more traditional choices. No one, however constrained their present life may be, is prepared when that life is tumbled, jumbled, tossed, spun, jerked, and turned upside down. We do not presume to think that a story can take such a sharp left turn without some sense of being jostled. We hope nothing was spilled. And now, we request your patience and a willingness to go with what is decidedly a very unusual flow. . . . Imagine how Fletcher feels.

Because what would you rather read about: a swashbuckling starship captain? Or a being as incomprehensible to us as we are to an amoeba? To be fair, science fiction novels have been written about a future in which this transformation has occurred. And I could write one of these, as well. The problem is that for the most part, people like reading about other people. People who are like them. People who act and think like, you know . . . people. Even if we imagine a future society of omniscient beings, we wouldn’t have much of a story without conflict. Without passions and frailties and fear of death. And what kind of a story could an amoeba write about a man, anyway? I believe that after a few hundred years of riding up this hockey-stick of explosive technological growth, humanity can forge a utopian society whose citizens are nearly-omniscient and nearly-immortal. Governed by pure reason rather than petty human emotions. A society in which unrecognizable beings live in harmony, not driven by current human limitations and motivations. Wow. A novel about beings we can’t possibly relate to, residing on an intellectual plane of existence incomprehensible to us, without conflict or malice. I think I may have just described the most boring novel ever written. Despite what I believe to be true about the future, however, I have to admit something: I still can’t help myself. I love space opera. When the next Star Trek movie comes out, I’ll be the first one in line. Even though I’ll still believe that if our technology advances enough for starships, it will have advanced enough for us to have utterly transformed ourselves, as well. With apologies to Captain Kirk and his crew, Star Trek technology would never coexist with a humanity we can hope to understand, much as dinosaurs and people really didn’t roam the earth at the same time. But all of this being said, as a reader and viewer, I find it easy to suspend disbelief. Because I really, really love this stuff. As a writer, though, it is more difficult for me to turn a blind eye to what I believe will be the truth. But, hey, I’m only human. A current human. With all kinds of flaws. So maybe I can rationalize ignoring my beliefs long enough to write a rip-roaring science fiction adventure. I mean, it is fiction, right? And maybe dinosaurs and mankind did coexist. The Flintstones wouldn’t lie, would they?  So while the mind-blowing pace of scientific progress has ruined far-future science fiction for me, at least when it comes to the writing of it, I may not be able to help myself. I may love old-school science fiction too much to limit myself to near-future thrillers. One day, I may break down, fall off the wagon, and do what I vowed during my last Futurists Anonymous meeting never to do again: write far-future science fiction.  And if that day ever comes, all I ask is that you not judge me too harshly.

There are stories like Superman, which require suspension of disbelief for maximum enjoyment. Then there are stories like mine – real stories – where for the most part, disbelief need not be suspended. There are no flying humans, no unfamiliar planets, and no optical illusions.

With our Darwinian demo methodology, we had a huge advantage over artificially selecting breeders and the glacially slow accumulations of genetic improvements that drive natural selection. Working in software meant we could move fast. We could make changes whenever we wanted, and we did. We created new demos that were concretely and specifically targeted to be better than the previous one. We constructed Hollywood backlots around these demos to provide context and to help us suspend our disbelief about the often nonexistent system surrounding the feature or app that was the focus of our attention. We gave each other feedback, both as initial impressions and after living on the software to test the viability of the ideas and quality of the associated implementations. We gathered up action items for the next iteration, and then we forged ahead toward the next demo. I’ve given a name to this continuing progression of demo -> feedback -> next demo: creative selection.

Listening to sublime music relieves you of thought; time comes to a stop; seconds, minutes, hours slide along into a continuum; you are suspended into an exalted world of disbelief.

Any lingering doubts that intelligence is a rich topic for neuroscience should be melted away given the genetic and neuroimaging studies described in the previous two chapters. If not, please suspend any remaining disbelief until the end of this chapter wherein even more compelling findings are described.

And there are weird, unprovable, crazy things that every religion believes. Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, it doesn’t matter – everybody has at least a couple core tenets that are flat-out dumb. Even atheists have to completely suspend disbelief about things like the apparent ‘purposeless’ of Nature and the insane improbability of the Big Bang. Give us one free miracle, and we’ll explain the rest for free!

There’s something uncanny about suspending disbelief and at the same time seeing the puppet’s strings.

Let the characters into your mind and heart; suspend your disbelief, if such it is, about the events. Do not disapprove of something a character does before you understand why he does it—if then. Try as hard as you can to live in his world, not in yours; there, the things he does may be quite understandable. And do not judge the world as a whole until you are sure that you have “lived” in it to the extent of your ability.

Visual and performing artists produce art that lives in the present world. The art of the writer exists in another dimension. Through strings of words and phrases writers inspire their readers to imagine, to conjure images, to suspend disbelief, to enter a world visible only in their minds. It is in that unseen world where the art of the writer lives.

Sure, if you eat enough mushrooms and get in a sweat lodge, you’ll see all the bright lights and pretty colors Hubble has to offer, but there’s nothing there.  Just like every other silly little spiritual distraction, there’s nothing there.  It’s all empty, hollow, meaningless, unsatisfying Chicken Soup for the Brain.  It demands that you suspend your disbelief even to the point of suspending your own senses.  It demands that you practice for years at something you can’t actually get better at.  It demands that you nod along with every stupid post-modernist notion some yoga instructor blurts out because you don’t want to be the only one at the party wearing incredulity.

Most books try to communicate their narratives directly to the reader so the reader's awareness of reading won't interfere with their experience of being absorbed into the narrative. Disbelief must be suspended so the reader's belief can co-generate the narrative. In a similar way, we generate an internal narrative: By unconsciously erasing the line between what's being thought and what is doing the thinking, we come to believe that we are our thoughts.